Advances in technology, particularly within the convergence space, have resulted in an increase in demand for voice recognition software that can exploit technology in ways that are intuitive to humans. While communication between human beings is most often “cooperative,” in that information and/or context is shared to advance mutual conversational goals, existing Human-to-Machine interfaces fail to provide the same level of intuitive interaction. For example, each human participant in a conversation can contribute to an exchange for the benefit of the exchange. This is done through shared assumptions and expectations regarding various aspects of the conversation, such as the topic, participant knowledge about the topic, expectations of the other participant's knowledge about the topic, appropriate word usage for the topic and/or participants, conversational development based on previous utterances, the participants' tone or inflection, the quality and quantity of contribution expected from each participant, and many other factors. Participating in conversations that continually build and draw upon shared information is a natural and intuitive way for humans to converse.
In contrast, complex Human-to-Machine interfaces do not allow users to exploit technology in an intuitive way, which inhibits mass-market adoption for various technologies. Incorporating a speech interface helps to alleviate this burden by making interaction easier and faster, but existing speech interfaces (when they actually work) still require significant learning on the part of the user. That is, existing speech interfaces are unable to bridge the gap between archaic Human-to-Machine interfaces and conversational speech that would make interaction with systems feel normal. Users should be able to directly request what they want from a system in a normal, conversational fashion, without having to memorize exact words or phrases. Alternatively, when users are uncertain of particular needs, they should be able to engage the system in a productive, cooperative dialogue to resolve their requests. Instead, existing speech interfaces force users to dumb down their requests to match simple sets of instructions in simple languages in order to communicate requests in ways that systems can understand. Using existing speech interfaces, there is virtually no option for dialogue between the user and the system to satisfy mutual goals.
Therefore, existing systems lack a conversational speech model that can provide users with the ability to interact with systems in ways that are inherently intuitive to human beings. Existing systems suffer from these and other problems.